


Not Enough Beer

by Aelfgyfu



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Epilogue, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 15:36:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1653743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aelfgyfu/pseuds/Aelfgyfu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack just wants some quiet time with his telescope after the team returns from the events of "Unnatural Selection," but Sam wants to talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Enough Beer

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: "Unnatural Selection" and previous episodes of SG-1, particularly "Menace."
> 
> First posted at Aelfgyfu's Mead Hall 20 Jul 2008.
> 
> Many thanks to Redbyrd and to my Brilliant Husband for reading two drafts of this and making corrections and helpful suggestions.  
> All remaining errors, infelicities, and incoherences are my own.
> 
>  _Stargate SG-1_ and its characters belong to MGM-UA, Gekko, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions, Stargate SG-1, Showtime/Viacom, NBC/Sci Fi, and no doubt other persons or entities whom I've forgotten (this list keeps getting longer). No copyright infringement is intended. In fact, my stories make no sense if you haven't seen the shows, so I encourage you to watch! And get all the DVDs! Just like I do!

Not Enough Beer

Jack opened another beer. Damn it, he'd just returned from another galaxy, where they'd saved the Asgard and their own galaxy again. He should be out celebrating, not up here drinking alone. But he really didn't have anyone to celebrate with; Teal'c took it as a given that they'd done the only thing they could, but he didn't drink, and the other half of his team didn't really see trapping those Replicators as a victory. 

If he was going to be honest, somehow he didn't feel like he'd won either—but the whole point of coming out here to spend the night with the telescope was to avoid delving into that crap. He took a big swig and tried to decide where to point the telescope, because looking at Abydos's sun wasn't helping; it brought back the wrong memories tonight. 

He hadn't made up his mind where to look instead when he heard the car pull up in front of his house. It sounded like Carter's. Damn, damn, damn. Maybe if he kept really quiet, she'd figure he was asleep. All the lights were off; it was a reasonable assumption.

He heard a tentative knock on the front door. Tentative was good. She probably did think he was asleep. If she didn't knock too loud, he'd only hear her if he was still awake. Very logical, very rational. Very calm, too. If she'd pounded on the door, he'd have known he was in trouble.

But pounding wasn't her style, and she'd been pretty damned quiet on the way back to Earth. And through the post-mission physical, and the briefing. She talked to Jonas, to Teal'c, to General Hammond. She didn't talk to him much. The silent treatment—and that was okay. Better to have her mad at him than mad at herself, which she probably was anyway.

She was knocking again, a little louder. That loud, and she could assume she'd wake him. Hell, Carter knew how he slept. She most likely assumed he'd heard her the first time. She must really want to talk.

Well, he didn't. He just wanted beer. The clear night was a bonus, though that actually wasn't working out the way he'd thought: Abydos made him think of Daniel, and past mistakes, and—something crunched around the side of the house, and he tensed. Oh, shit. She'd figured it out.

Sure enough, a moment later "Sir?" came floating up from below.

Jack sighed and leaned back against the wood sides of the platform. Keeping his mouth shut probably wouldn't help; she'd be up here in a minute. She just wanted to alert him so he didn't shoot her or push her off or anything.

Next came the squeak of shoes on a wood rung. Gym shoes, not combat boots.

"Sir?" There was just enough light from the sliver of moon and the stars to reflect off her blond hair. Why was it still blond anyway? Everybody else's hair darkened. Daniel's had gone from blond to brown; he'd blamed it on practically living underground, but Jack knew better. Sara had been using hair color since she'd been in her late twenties. No natural blondes after thirty, she'd told him, and having a kid had ended her time early.

"Sir?" Carter's whole face appeared above the platform, but she seemed reluctant to come all the way up.

"Carter, go home," he said, trying to sound just tired and not angry or resentful or anything else he didn't want her to hear. None of it was her fault. Mostly, it was the Replicators'; partly, it was the Asgard's; and the rest, well, that was his, all his, and she wasn't going to take that away from him.

He could barely see her eyebrows knitting together.

"Carter, what did I tell you? Go home. Don't have enough beer for two." He added a touch of "drunk" to the tired in his voice. He could act. Fooled Daniel in that damned trap for Maybourne and his people. Carter wouldn't want to deal with him drunk.

She looked at the beer and, unbelievably, resumed her climb. "Looks like plenty to me."

"No, it's all mine, and if you want anything, you're gonna have to go to the liquor store and buy it yourself!" He'd have had more than five beers up here , but he hadn't taken stock before the unexpected mission—missions, plural—and hadn't know that he didn't even have a full six-pack. Stupid son of—he needed to stay on top of that sort of thing in the future.

Carter sat down cross-legged in jeans and a jacket a foot away from him and grabbed a beer. "Twist off?" She squinted at the bottle in the darkness, then looked at the caps next to him.

"Better for when the coordination gets worse," he snapped.

She twisted hers off with what might have been a smile. "I think you'd need more than this to have trouble opening them, sir, even with an opener."

"Oh, enough with the ‘sir' already! It's not like you're taking my orders! I told you to go home, and yet you're here! And you took my beer!" Now that she was up here, the trick was to keep it light. Keep it light, then let her think she'd gotten something, and then she'd go home, satisfied, and leave him to wonder if he should break his rule against hard liquor up here. Not that he had any regrets about what they'd done—what he'd done. 

"All right, Jack," she said far too carefully as she took a sip of beer. A sip. Oh, for crying out loud! 

He took a gulp just because. "Carter, I don't want to get into it."

"Jonas kept asking me questions," she said, ignoring him. "About Reese. He'd read Daniel's journals—you know, I really like Jonas, but should he really be reading Daniel's personal entries?"

Jack stiffened; he couldn't help it. Daniel never did keep personal and mission-related separate, did he? He'd have to check on those journals. Probably too late, at the rate Jonas read things.

Carter went on conversationally, "Anyway, so he's really got Daniel's view of what happened with Reese, and his idea that maybe she could have been key to controlling the Replicators, so I...."

"So you had to do some...damage control." Jack sighed. It was good of her to tell him. Lousy timing, but he did need to know. "Thanks, Carter."

"I told him to read the reports, but those are pretty brief, and...clinical."

That was one word for them, he supposed. Objective, rational. Sensible. Cold.

"I don't think he really understood how close we were...." She let that thought hang; he really didn't need any reminders about the self-destruct nearly activating. "I tried to tell him. But he thought this was our second chance with the Replicators."

Jack snorted without any real humor. "Except it wasn't. More like our fourth or fifth chance? I lose count." Fourth, actually. He never lost count; he just didn't like to dwell. "And this was the first time we didn't lose anybody, human or Asgard, to them!"

After some hesitation, she nodded.

Jack didn't want to tell her that by the time they got back, Jonas seemed less bothered about the whole thing than she did, so he said instead, "Jonas seems to pal around a lot with Teal'c. If he needs to talk it out some more, he'll go to the big guy." Teal'c could probably set him straight a hell of a lot more persuasively than Jack could right now: Teal'c had no doubts and no regrets about the way they'd handled Fifth, Jack was certain. Not that he had doubts himself; he just wished things had played out differently.

Carter didn't reply, so he prodded her to get to the point: "But you didn't come here in the middle of the night to tell me Jonas wants a do-over." She'd better not have, because he'd already known that—and that she kinda wanted one too.

She looked at him, waiting. Time to throw her something; it didn't have to be what she'd come looking for, because she was pretty distractable when she found something new to interest her. Then maybe she'd leave him alone, so he could get back to not thinking, which he'd been trying really hard to do. Used to be better at it. Used to take no effort at all, really.

He sighed again, this time for dramatic purposes, hoping it didn't sound too fake. "I know, Carter. I wanna tell you, I do really appreciate you not hesitating—"

"They were orders, sir," she interrupted.

"Yeah, but I know you didn't like them, and any real hesitation, he'd have figured it out. Fifth may have been naïve, but he wasn't stupid."

"No," she said, looking down at her beer. "No, he wasn't." She took a swig this time, a proper swig.

Jack took one too. "You have to follow orders. You don't have to like them. You did your job. You told me you disagreed as soon as it was appropriate, but you didn't push it with Hammond—which I also appreciate, by the way."

She shook her head. "I'm not questioning your orders, sir."

This conversation required more alcohol. He drank before responding. "You were on the way home."

"Yes, sir, I was. But then I thought, if I'd been in command...."

Oh, hell. Of course his 2IC should be thinking like this; his knees told him she'd be in command before too long. But this was exactly the sort of situation he didn't want for her command, though he knew that time was coming.

"I see your reasoning, sir, with two galaxies—maybe even more—riding on keeping the Replicators bottled up. But I worry that we...that we've condemned an innocent to suffer there with the guilty."

"No suffering involved, Carter. It's a time bubble, not a torture chamber."

"Except that he's in there with five other Replicators he betrayed!" Her voice rose, and her chin came up as she gave him what was probably a glare, but then she turned her head down and to the side again.

"Yeah," Jack admitted. "I don't think they're gonna be too pleased."

"What do you think they'll do to him, sir?" she asked, leaning forward.

Oh. Oh. Was that why she'd come? He thought she'd come to argue that they should have done things differently, but no. Nothing that simple.

"I dunno. What do you think?" he asked casually.

"I don't know! I can't remember anything about them being in my head—except Fifth, when he said he wanted to help and asked me what to do." She clutched the beer tightly. "He smiled at me." She let out a breath he could hear over the breeze ruffling the leaves. "But you remember."

"Not much," he said. Not much beer left in this bottle, either. At the rate she was going at hers, he'd be sure to get four, anyway. Wouldn't be enough.

"But more than any of the rest of us do! You told General Hammond—"

"I know what I told General Hammond!" he snapped. He'd told Hammond too much, and he wasn't even sure why. Must be getting old. Telling them that he'd relived Charlie—he didn't have to do that. He could have said something else. He could have said he didn't remember. 

He'd just needed them to know what they were up against, what these Replicators were capable of, even if they looked human. Ba'al had tortured his body, and that was still all too fresh in his mind. But at least Ba'al hadn't touched his memories. Except maybe his memories of Daniel, but he hadn't touched even those directly. Jack had done that himself. Assuming, of course, that that was all just memory and his mind playing tricks on him.

And that was the only acceptable option, because Jack would not believe Daniel could confine himself to just floating around and occasionally offering ascension to anybody he wanted and otherwise shirk all responsibility. He sure as hell wasn't going to believe Daniel could have helped them with these Replicators and wouldn't, seeing how Carter had already gotten involved with the Replicator, that she was making the same mistake Daniel had with that damned android: thinking that it didn't matter that it wasn't human, that their similarities were more important than their differences, that they could all sit down together and sing and get along like cutesy animals in a Disney movie.

"Sir," Carter said with studied patience, "you know what they did to you. You know how they punished you. But what will they do with Fifth? At that weird dinner there, they just kind of talked about him like he was re—a little slow, someone who didn't quite fit in. So maybe they won't be punishing him. Do you think?" She was picking up speed, sounding hopeful again.

"As little as possible," he said. "But yeah, I bet you're right." He was damned if one of his team was going to lie awake nights worrying about a Replicator suffering. "They talked about us as animals, said if we could look into the minds of the animals we eat, we'd feel superior, too. Fifth may not be all they want, but he's one of them, not one of us. They won't treat him like that, anymore than we'd put a slow kid in with the cattle."

"But he acted like one of us. He helped us!" That was Carter, arguing both sides of the matter. At least this time she'd made it clear which side she wanted to win. It was harder when he had to guess. Sometimes he guessed wrong, and that was always rough on both of them.

Jack shook his head. "But he's still one of them. They already know what's in his head. And he doesn't have any bad memories for them to torture him with." It was out of his mouth before he thought, that might be a mistake.

"How do you think he remembers me?" Carter asked, too quick as always. Maybe if she drank more beer? Nah—he didn't have enough up here to slow her down, even if he handed her the one he'd just opened.

"He'll remember that I looked at him and lied! I smiled to his face and lied!" 

Jack believed that a first-contact team had to have people who thought and felt, not mindless drones. Still, it was times like this he wished some of them didn't overthink everything. Sometimes he wished the others could be more like Teal'c. Teal'c could feel remorse—boy, could he—but he knew when it was appropriate, and when it wasn't. Teal'c was not going to be wasting his kel-no-reem worrying about that curly-headed Replicator. T had already indicated with a look that he knew Jack had made the necessary choice. It would be easier if Carter could just do the same.

Of course, he was glad Carter didn't carry a baby snake in her gut or an inconvenient revenge compulsion, so maybe he should just be happy with what he had. Except that his team was still missing somebody, even if there were four of them again. He forced that thought to the back of his mind.

"Carter, you did what you had to do." He'd already practiced this, not only in his head, but at the debriefing. "If Fifth hadn't distracted them, we'd never have made it out. Even if we trusted him not to make any more, not to turn on us, we just couldn't get him out! If there was time for him to follow, there'd have been time for First, and Second, and Third—"

"But I lied to him! I could have given him the choice!" He could tell from her voice that she really meant it, too. She hadn't voiced that at the debriefing; maybe it was a new idea. Maybe that was why she drove out here so late.

"We couldn't take the chance," Jack told her. "If he'd said no? If he'd even taken time to think about it? They'd have finished communicating with their Erector Set buddies, and they'd have been on us before we got out! Sometimes, we have to let somebody go!" And he really couldn't work himself up to regretting letting that Replicator go, even if he wanted to, which he didn't. He had enough real regrets. He finished off the beer, reaching for another.

"And in his only encounter with humans, we screwed him completely! I lied to him and left him there!" 

Part of Jack's mind observed drily that she must be upset; she'd left off the "sir." The rest of him focused on what he had to tell her: "Not your fault, Carter. My orders, my responsibility." A responsibility he hadn't hesitated to accept, from the moment he'd said "five minutes" and signaled "three," and he wasn't going to shirk it now.

"And you think you did the right thing," she said.

"Yes. In fact, I know I did the right thing."

"That's why you're on the roof with all the beer you had in the house, sir?" It sounded more like a statement than a question. 

He could see no point in not being honest, although it did occur to him that two beers ago he might possibly have seen a reason. "Just because I think it was the best of a bad bunch of choices doesn't mean I'm happy with it. They weren't people, Carter. They may even have thought they were, but they weren't. I'm not up here feeling bad for them. I just wish it wasn't something that divided the team."

"Sir, if Daniel—" she started wistfully.

Shit. Daniel was the reason that he'd turned the telescope away from Abydos, why he was drinking beer, and where he really didn't want this conversation to go. "But Daniel wasn't there! He's busy with his glowy friends, off seeing the universe." There. By the end it sounded like he wasn't angry anymore.

"I just can't help but think," she said quietly, twirling in one hand the beer bottle he thought she'd forgotten, "that if Daniel had been with us, he might have seen some possibility we didn't see."

Before he could answer, she continued, "Sometimes I think Daniel could be watching us. I mean, Orlin watched us—and Oma must have been keeping an eye on Daniel, to know—" She sounded hopeful, like if she wished hard enough, he really wouldn't be gone. 

"Carter, Daniel's gone. I don't know where, and I really don't know how. I hope wherever he is, he's enjoying himself."

"Don't you think he'd want to see us? See how we're doing?"

"No, Carter, I don't. He's got big, big stuff to figure out, like life, the universe, and everything, and I'm sure that's what he's off doing."

His tone must have been wrong, because she was looking at him keenly, he knew even though he couldn't see her eyes anymore, and she asked, "Why are you so sure he's not with us? He could—"

Jack remembered the unopened beer in his hand and fumbled opening the cap; some beer spilled over the wood, and a little onto his jeans, and he shouted, "Okay! I don't know! I just hope to God he's not, because I hope he didn't see what I did back there!"

After a long swallow of beer, his thoughts cleared enough to think that hell, he'd have said it sooner if he'd known that would shut her up—and if he hadn't been trying so damned hard not to think it. It was bad enough second-guessing himself, but imagining Daniel second-guessing him was just too much. He knew he was right, and he didn't used to have to worry about decisions like this. Replicators were the enemy and couldn't be trusted. Period. End of paragraph. End of book.

"Sir?" Carter asked in a small voice. Trust Carter with your life, the fate of the world, the fate of the known universe. Just never, ever trust her to know when to keep her mouth shut.

That wasn't fair, he knew. She'd kept her mouth shut on the planet, when she wanted to insist they take that Replicator with them. 

When she spoke again, her voice was louder and harder, edging towards anger. "You're saying you'd rather be without Daniel than have him—have him what? Know that you're human?"

"Have him call me a stupid son of a bitch again!"

He could tell from the tilt of Carter's head that she was looking at him blankly, but the fact that he could no longer see her face by the dim light of the stars and the moon that had almost set was starting to get really weird. Like he hadn't already been weirded out sitting up here before, wondering: if Daniel hadn't really come to Jack at all in Ba'al's fortress, then Jack had been hallucinating. But it hadn't stopped right away when he got away from Ba'al. He'd seen Daniel again in the infirmary. If it was just a hallucination, it could happen again, and he might not get any warning. That was dangerous to the whole team.

But if Daniel had come to him when Ba'al tortured him, if that was really Daniel, did that mean Daniel was watching all the time? Silently, sadly shaking his head, or whatever the glowy equivalent of that was? Crossing his arms and giving Jack That Look?

"Sir?"

Jack had to think for a minute what she was asking. "What he said right after I shot Reese," Jack explained. "He called me a stupid son of a bitch."

"Oh." He wasn't sure she understood, but it seemed to satisfy her.

He was too old for this, too tired. He wanted to stop wondering what Daniel would have done, what Daniel might think of him even now, if he was in fact watching, and whether he was simply going nuts for worrying about what his dead—not dead, ascended—friend might think of him. He was far too exhausted to deal with a second-in-command who wanted to know that they'd done the right thing when he was pretty damned sure they had—but somehow he was equally sure he'd have disappointed their teammate.

"Carter, what do you want me to tell you? That they'd have destroyed life in our galaxy? You were the one who convinced me of that! Well, you and Thor. We had one shot at this, just one, and we had to do it. I didn't like doing it; is that what you want to hear?"

"I remember you telling Daniel once to give you another option. And he did." Her voice was so quiet he wasn't sure how much he was hearing and how much his mind was filling in the blanks, but what the hell? His mind seemed to be filling in too much lately.

"And I damn near blew him up in the process!"

"It was my finger on the button, sir!" she reminded him sharply. "I'd have been just as responsible!" The hurt in her voice made him wonder briefly if she still felt guilty that she hadn't been able to help Daniel with the healing device.

She wasn't responsible for that bomb, not in the eyes of the military, but he knew that wouldn't count for much with her. "Is that your point? That you're just as responsible for that Replicator as I am? 'Cause you're wrong on both counts. I'm responsible. You followed orders. If there's guilt involved, it's mine."

"I wish I could have given you another option." So she was beating herself up because she wasn't Daniel. Daniel hadn't done so hot with Replicators himself.

"I'm sure Jonas wishes it too, but he couldn't. Sometimes, Carter, there aren't other options; sometimes even Daniel couldn't come up with them. We did what we had to do. We saved life as we know it. I think that's pretty good!" He sounded convincing. Hell, he was convinced.

She finally set down the damned beer. She wasn't drinking it anyway. Maybe he could get what was left after she was gone, if she ever did leave.

"You think you can keep it all to yourself, sir?" He could almost hear a smile in her voice—a small one, a sad one. "It doesn't really work, sir."

He knew what she meant, but he didn't have to admit that. "Keep what to myself? You already took one!" 

"I didn't mean the beer, sir. I meant the guilt."

What was with his team that they didn't recognize the importance of beer? Depite that lecture they'd gotten God alone knew how many times from Daniel about how civilization began so that they could make beer. Even Jonas had picked it up, no doubt from Daniel's books or his journals, and when he started into that one just a couple of weeks after Jack had let him on the team, it was all Jack could do not to strangle the man.

"Look, I let you swipe one beer, but if there's any guilt here—and I'm not saying there is," he added, pointing a finger at her in the dark, "but if there is, then the responsibility here is mine." He used his command tone. It rarely stopped Daniel, but it was often enough to stop Carter. 

She started to speak again anyway, so he cut her off, because they could go back and forth on this all night, and she was never gonna convince him. "Did you come here just to argue?"

"Yeah," she said, to his great surprise. "Because Daniel wasn't available." Something between a laugh and a sob escaped her. He started to put an arm around her, but then he realized he was still holding his beer, and it wasn't appropriate anyway, so he ended up just kind of waving his arms around, and she giggled a little.

"Actually, sir, I came to tell you that I'm afr—that I think you were right. That I thought about it, and I decided that we did the only thing we could."

He tried to decide if he liked it better when she thought he was wrong, when she had more hope that there was one Replicator worth saving. He was never gonna let himself get this low on beer again. 

Carter hadn't finished. "And that, God, it sucks when there's no right choice." 

So she didn't really think it was the right choice. He felt a weird relief at that, which was funny, because just a few minutes before he'd been wishing she wouldn't worry about what they'd done. But if the team didn't have anybody left trying to do the right thing—well, that didn't really bear thinking about. Maybe he couldn't always do the right thing, the best thing, but he wanted, needed somebody to point out the better option to him if there was one. No one could replace Daniel—but then again, no one could replace Carter either.

Apparently she wasn't done, because she took a deep breath. Then she said, "And I thought, maybe you didn't need to be alone tonight."

He slumped against the slats of his observation deck again. Just when he thought Earth had no more surprises for him, Carter turned out to be smarter about him than he was. He probably shouldn't be surprised, except that people really weren't her strong point so much. They were Daniel's—but then again, Daniel got people weirdly wrong, too, especially his friends, maybe because he'd stopped studying them and started just doing and saying—

Carter didn't stop. "I didn't mean to make this about me, or about Fifth. I just thought—I miss Daniel, too, sir, and I thought, he'd have been here, if he could. But I didn't know what to say, and now I've...."

Did she really not remember the huge fights he had with Daniel? How sometimes they didn't speak for a couple of days? How awkward they'd been after he'd shot Reese, for God's sake?

"I'm not as good with people, not like Daniel was...."

And her thoughts were such a parody of his own that he burst out laughing. "Like calling me a stupid son of a bitch?"

There was a gasp across from him. Hell, it was getting so dark he'd need his flashlight to get her down the rungs safely.

But he was damned if she was going to leave like this, all maudlin. "How about in the Sixties, when they were asking him if he was a spy, in Russian, and he said, ‘Nyet'? Real convincing there! Then there was the time when we went off-world with those ex-NID operatives, and they expressed a...lack of confidence in him, so he pulled out a knife and said, ‘Which end do the bullets go in again?'"

That definitely got a laugh. "Sir, he was making fun of them!" Carter protested anyway.

"Yeah—I know I try to tick off people whose help I need early and often."

"You do!" she insisted.

He smiled even if she couldn't see him—maybe because she couldn't see him. "I just said so, didn't I?"

She laughed again, and then she added, "Remember when we had to go to Russia, and Daniel and I ended up in that submarine with Doctor Markov?" As if he could have forgotten. "Daniel kept making cracks about the sub—right in front of Markov."

"If he was in that teeny little sub at the time, he could hardly do it not in front of her."

"She pointed out the sub wasn't even Russian; it was Swiss-made." After a dramatic pause, she resumed, "So he said, 'So it occasionally catches fire, but it keeps perfect time?'"

He couldn't help grinning. He hadn't heard that one. "I'm sure that really improved our relations with the Russians. Daniel always was good at motivating people. Y'know, when he first came on the project, before anyone had even figured out how to use the Stargate, he walked right into the room, took one look at the blackboard all those ‘experts' were using, erased everything they'd written, and told them they shouldn't be using Budge!" He remembered those professors just gaping at the young guy who needed a haircut, and how he'd thought, well, maybe this one geek wasn't as useless as the rest.

"I wish I could have seen that," Carter said, with some enthusiasm.

"Ah, you saw him pull enough of those sorts of stunts later."

"Not enough, sir," she said more quietly. "Never enough."

His smile gone, he took another sip of beer.

"He wouldn't condemn you, sir. He wouldn't have liked it—but...." she took a deep breath. "He once shot up a tank full of symbiotes so that they'd never take hosts." 

Jack shook his head. "He never agreed with my shooting Reese. He dropped it, but he never thought I was right." Now who didn't know when to drop it? She'd had to reach years back to find a moment when Daniel had done something wrong, or at least something that wasn't exactly right. He shouldn't argue with Carter now; he should let her hold on to whatever allowed her to live with the mission.

Carter didn't seem concerned with herself at the moment, though. "He might have disagreed with your decision, sir, but he still believed in you."

Jack shrugged.

"It was you he came to when he was dying." God, he didn't want to remember that—to think about whether he'd made the wrong choice, whether he should have told Jacob to keep going, that they'd keep whatever of Daniel they could salvage. 

"He knew he could trust you to do what he wanted." 

He was surprised at the slight emphasis she put on the pronoun. As if Daniel wouldn't trust the others? He did—he had. He'd trusted every one of them with his life, again and again. He'd just picked Jack that time, that was all. The way things had been going between them lately, it had surprised the hell out of him. 

"And he's free now. I don't understand it myself, sir," she continued, "but I know you did what he wanted, and he didn't really die. I miss him—but maybe he's happy now. I hope so." Her voice shook a little.

After a while, she added, in a steadier voice, "Sometimes, though, I think he is watching us. Just looking in on us, from time to time. Making sure we're okay."

Jack nodded. If she wanted to believe that, fine by him. "And we are. We're okay." 

"Yeah," she said, her surprise audible. "We are." She shifted, grunting a little. God, if she was stiff, he'd be immobile. "I think I need to head home, sir." She held up a bottle he knew wasn't empty though he could barely see even the shape of the thing.

"Leave it," he said. "I'll clean it all up tomorrow." No way he was going down the ladder in the dark with beer bottles.

She started to climb down.

"Here, I got a flashlight somewhere." He'd stuck one in a pocket so that he could see if he needed to make fine adjustments to the scope. He made a show of fumbling before pulling it out to cover his own attempts to get himself up. His butt had fallen asleep. He'd need those muscles to get down.

"It's okay, sir. I don't need to see. Sometimes it's easier if you don't look." Again, he could hear that smile in her voice.

He went down after her, figuring he could at least walk her to her car. He hoped she didn't notice how much slower he was on the ladder than she'd been.

"Good night, sir," she said awkwardly, fishing out her car keys. She pushed a button, and the light in her car came on as it unlocked.

"I think it's really morning now," he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. "But thanks for comin' by." 

"I just wanted to be sure you were all right."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm all right." 

Then she was in her car and backing out of his driveway, and he gave a wave she probably couldn't see.

Sometimes, the universe sucked. He hated when it threw crap their way and made them feel responsible for it. It wasn't enough that they saved two or more galaxies from certain destruction; no, they were supposed to deal with a Replicator that seemed a little more human than the rest and decide if he was worth saving and how to balance that risk against the risk to all of humanity—and Asgard. He hated that Carter had had to look in the eyes of something she thought was human and promise they'd take it with them, that she was now consoling herself with a memory Daniel'd probably wish she'd forgotten. Even more than all that, though, he hated that they didn't have Daniel here now to argue with them and, yes, call him a stupid son of a bitch or whatever new or used insult came to mind.

He knew the universe would throw more crap their way, too. 

But maybe, just maybe, the three of them would be okay sometimes. No, the four of them, because Jonas wasn't going away anytime soon, and he was turning out to be all right, though Jack was sure as hell going through Daniel's journals to see if there were some Jonas shouldn't be reading. But they'd be okay. Because they were alive, and Carter, upset as she was, had even come out here in the middle of the night to make sure that he was all right. Which he was—maybe because she had come.

Jack didn't know if Daniel was looking in on them. He decided to save that question for another night. 

He'd need more beer for that one.

FIN


End file.
